


Wedding Bells

by LoveMeSomeRafael



Category: Captain America, Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky letting go of Steve, Endgame isn't what you thought - not exactly, M/M, MRBB2020, Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2020, POV Bucky Barnes, Post-Endgame, Stucky - Freeform, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27586052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveMeSomeRafael/pseuds/LoveMeSomeRafael
Summary: Seeing Steve’s wedding ring made it all real.  That’s when Bucky knew he had to say goodbye.  So he goes back to Brooklyn, to where it all began, with his most treasured possession: a drawing Steve made of the two of them.Inspired by the video, "Wedding Bells" by Karadanverss (nomadicwolf, CanarysArrow).  Link to the video is below the banner.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40
Collections: Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2020





	Wedding Bells

A Stucky short inspired by [this beautiful, heartbreaking video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeXWnYQOgk) by Karadanverss (nomadicwolf, CanarysArrow) to the Jonas Brothers' "Wedding Bells" for Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2020.

* * *

I knew he wasn’t coming back. He told me. I need to say that up front. Because it’s really Steve who’s the good guy in this situation, and  _ me _ who let  _ him _ go. I’m the one who didn’t tell him the truth. So no one can blame him for choosing the past and Peggy Carter over me. He didn’t choose, because I never gave him a choice. 

But damn it hit me hard, seeing that wedding ring.

It shouldn’t have. Steve told me he wasn’t coming back and he told me why. I knew he was going back to what he called his right place in time, and he was gonna try to marry Peggy Carter. When he missed his window to come back to the present, I knew he’d succeeded. And then I saw him sitting on that bench. Old, but still unmistakably Steve. And yet somehow, even seeing him wearing all those years on his face didn’t make it real the way seeing that ring did.

Thing is, that wedding ring means Steve proposed to her. Planned it, sweated over it, and then went over the fucking moon when she said yes. It means he put on a suit, waited at the end of a church aisle, and then promised all his love to her forever. It means he slept every night holding her the way I used to hold him when he weighed ninety-five pounds and we were too damn poor to keep the heat on at night. It means that all his kisses and smiles and laughs belong to her now, and have for seventy years. It’s her he’s been thinking of all that time. He did it. He’s hers now. 

I gotta do something. I gotta try to let go of this stupid, useless torch I been carrying for him since we were teenagers. 

That’s what I’m doing sitting here in this alley, where Steve got his ass kicked for the millionth time on the night before I shipped out for the war. It’s as close as I can get to a place that was “home” for us. Our old apartment building was near here, but they tore it down forty years ago. This is a place where we were together on the last night when we were us. When he was my Stevie instead of the world’s Captain America, and I was just a stupid punk kid without the first hint of the hell that was coming.

It’s late, and I’m a little drunk. With the serum, that ain’t as easy to accomplish as it used to be, so it’s taken a lot of rye. I’m sitting here swigging it right from the bottle and thinking about Steve. Thinking about how we laughed about nothing, called each other names, and argued just to argue. I’m remembering us going to the pictures, or out dancing, or just messing around. I’m thinking that, even when times were tough, me and Stevie were a team. We scraped by together. We shared everything. We propped each other up when our folks died.

I’m also thinking about how beautiful he’s always been. What his hair smelled like, and how his rail-thin body felt on those cold winter nights when it was just him and me. I’m remembering how I’d sometimes have to jerk off before we went to bed so he wouldn’t feel what being close to him did to me. I was always so damn scared he’d figure out how much I loved him. 

It hurts so fucking bad I’m sitting here crying like a baby. I can only imagine what anyone would think if they saw me. Sitting in a dead-end alley, drunk and crying. 

I was about to say that Stevie would laugh. But I don’t think he would. I think he’d get that look on his face, the one he gets when he feels like he failed. He’d feel bad that he couldn’t love me the way I love him. That ain’t his fault, but he’d feel guilty anyway. He always did take on the weight of the world. 

In that way, I’m glad I never told him. He told Sam his life with Peggy had been beautiful, and that’s as it should be. It’s what he deserves. So I’m glad I never told him I’ve always loved him, because that woulda been a stain on his beautiful life.

I got a picture in my hands. A drawing Steve made. It’s dark in this alley, a little hard to see, but I don’t need to see it with my eyes. This picture is seared on my soul. It’s a part of me. It’s a picture of me and Stevie, the way we feel in my heart: friendship, love, loyalty, want, all wrapped up together. That’s why I think what I’m about to do might be a way to — I don’t know — let loose of him. 

I remember when Steve drew this picture. We were nineteen, and he was already under my skin bad by that time. I was having a tough time with it. I knew nothing could ever come of the way I felt. Even if loving another fella wasn’t off limits, me and Stevie were best friends, and I wasn’t willing to mess up our friendship over what I hoped was just a passing crush. 

I remember as he was drawing it, his hair was falling in his eyes like it did ever since he was a little kid. He was sitting on that old threadbare couch we had, a musty, second-hand job covered in some kinda fake velvet in a horrid green. I was listening to a ball game and it was too damn hot to do more than sit still drinking a cold beer. I looked over at him, and he was chewing on the end of his pencil the way he did, forehead all scrunched up from concentrating so hard. Seen him like that a million times.

“What’re you drawin’, Stevie?”

“Nothin’, Buck. ‘S just a picture of us.”

“Yeah? What’re we doin’ in it?”

“Nothin’. Just hangin’ around. Laughin’ at how stupid you are.”

“Some imagination you got there, wise guy.”

I went back to the game and didn’t think anything more about it until a couple days later, when I got up in the middle of the night to find him out on the fire escape drawing by the light of the streetlamp. As long as I live, I’ll never forget how fucking beautiful he looked, eyes squinting at his work, with a little bit of breeze messing with the hair falling over his forehead. He looked so good I could feel it in my bones. 

He was wearing a pair of slacks that fit real loose on him, hand-me-downs from some cousin or other who’d outgrown them when they were twelve. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his suspenders hung off his hips while he worked his pencil with those long fingers of his that were so pretty I sometimes had to look away from them. 

He looked up at me. I didn’t wanna be caught staring, so I said, “You’re gonna ruin your eyes, you nut. Then you’ll be blind  _ and  _ a fathead.” 

“Har har. What’re you doin’ up?”

“Too fuckin’ hot to sleep. What’re you drawin?”

“Just workin’ on that picture.”

“What, the one of us? Still?”

“Well, you’re hard to draw. If I make it look too much like you, it’ll hurt your feelings.”

“Yeah, you’re a regular comedian. Lemme see.”

He held it out to me. One thing about Steve and his drawing, he was never one of those guys who won’t let you see a picture until it’s perfect. Never had any of that bullshit fake modesty about how good he was, either. He didn’t brag, I don’t mean that, I just mean he loved to draw and he didn’t think much about how good he was, he was just always trying to get better. That’s Steve, in a nutshell, I guess.

I remember my breath got stuck in my lungs for a minute. This picture, it’s… Well, it just perfectly captures who we were. We’re just standing there on the street in front of our building. I got my arm around his shoulder, and we’re laughing our asses off at something. We look so happy. We look just like what we were: best friends who’d rather be with each other than anybody else. The way he drew me, I never looked that good on my best day, and something about that makes me feel good. Like he sees me as better looking than I am or something. I figure he put some feelings into that, and that’s part of why I love it so much. 

I’m turned toward him in the picture, and I swear I’m looking at him like he’s my girl or something. I remember wondering when I saw it if he knew how I felt about him. He never said nothing, and I never did, either, but I always wondered. I figure I musta looked at him like that a lot, because it’s how I felt. And the thing is, he’s looking at me in the picture, too. 

He made himself look real good. He didn’t always do that. Me, I always thought Stevie was the prettiest thing I ever saw, but he didn’t. He thought he was homely and scrawny, and I could never convince him otherwise. All them fucking dames I tried to set him up with didn’t help, either. I know I ain’t supposed to call them dames, but some of them turned out to be less than ladies, at least in the way they treated Steve. 

Anyway, when he finished that picture, I knew I had to have it. It was as close as I was ever gonna get to a picture of me and Steve the way I wished we could be. He never did much with his pictures. Tacked a few on the wall, and that's about it. Mostly they just stayed in his drawing pad. I wanted that one bad, but I couldn’t ask. So I’d just sneak looks at it in his notebook whenever I could. Didn’t get around to asking him for it until the day I left for basic training at Fort McCoy. I told him I wanted something to remember us, and he ragged me about it, but he also gave me the picture, and that’s all I cared about. 

It’s torn on the creases now, this picture. As I sit here in this alley, part of the drawing ain’t even there no more. It’s worn off with time and barely there where those creases are. I musta looked at this thing a million times. Looked at it when I was at basic and then after I shipped out, and felt like I had a fucking anvil on my chest, I missed him so bad. A lot of times I had to settle for just touching it, because I couldn’t take it out and have the fellas see me mooning over a picture of me and another guy. That’s probably the only reason there’s anything left of it at all. 

I had it with me when we were captured and taken to Krausberg. Don’t know why they let me keep it, but they did. I never touched it or looked at it, in case they saw and ripped it up just to be assholes. I thought about it, though. Once they took me to that fucking lab and I knew I was gonna die, I thought about home, about Steve, and I felt bad for him having to find out I was dead. I wished I wasn’t strapped down so I could look at that drawing one more time.

And then, after they’d put that fire into me, the stuff I learned later was kinda like the serum they gave Steve, there he was. All big and beautiful and looking down at me like he’d found the Holy Grail. He was still Steve in every way that counted, but now he was healthy and fast and strong as anything. 

Took me forever to know how to feel about that, Stevie being all big and strong. I mean, I was happy he wasn’t sick no more, and he’d got his wish to come to Europe and do his part in the war. But to this day, I wanna give him a knuckle sandwich for putting himself in the kind of danger it took to get that way. I let him have it for that, believe me. And he’s always been a hothead, but after the serum he lost any sense of self-preservation he ever had. So even though he wasn’t nervous and sickly anymore, I still had to spend the whole war running after him trying to keep him alive. 

Everybody suddenly paid attention to him once he became Captain America, and I had mixed feelings about that, too. I was proud as hell of him, and glad that everybody could finally see the man I’d always seen. But that was exactly the problem. When he was little, he was mine. After he got big, he belonged to everybody. Sure, we were still best buddies, and he was the same Stevie, but I admit it. I was jealous. I wanted him to be just mine again. 

I loved him little, and I loved him big. It was every bit as complicated after the serum as before, just in different ways. Except for those feelings I had that I couldn’t tell anyone about. Those stayed the same.

Peggy Carter was in Europe, too, during the war. I remember the night I met her, in that damn red dress, looking every inch the firecracker Steve said she was. She was a damn knockout, and the way she looked at Steve, I don’t know how he kept from going up in flames right there. Honest to God, I thought I was gonna shrivel up and die, I felt so bad. I don’t think she even looked at me once, which was probably a damn good thing. Stevie’s heart is too pure, and he’s always been too loyal a friend to have seen how jealous I was. But she’d have seen it, if she’d looked. There was just no way I could be happy for him that night. I couldn’t even pretend. I had to learn to do that over time. 

And now he’s married to her. He’s got that damn gold wedding band on his finger, and for him, it’s been there for a lifetime. Thank God I never had to see the two of them together again after that one night. 

Stevie recruited the Howling Commandos and we traipsed all over Europe digging out Hydra bases. In many ways, that was a good time for me. Me and Stevie were together, and if he had to be in a war, at least I was there to look after him. I didn’t know what was gonna happen once we got back home, except that we weren’t gonna be spending every minute together like we did before, or like we were in Europe. So I just lived day by day, enjoying the time I had with him.

Then, of course, I fell off the train and Steve saved all those cities by crashing the Valkyrie into the arctic. Life sure is kooky, the way we both thought the other was dead, and then it turns out neither of us was, and we ended up together again.

He got to sleep peacefully for seventy years under the ice. Me, I survived my fall because of the stuff Zola put into me, and I got found by the Russians. I had it tough for a while. They did the most godawful fuckin’ things to me you can imagine, and a lot of shit you could never imagine. I did the best I could, but after a while there wasn’t much left of me except hurt. Still, I wasn’t gonna let them beat me. I was just gonna hold on until the torture killed me, never give in. 

But then they told me Steve was dead. Showed me the newspapers and laughed. That was the end. Because I knew it was true. Hydra is clever as hell, they can think up a lot of shit to torture a guy, but they could never think up that story, crashing a plane to save the world. They don’t have a concept for that kind of selfless bravery. And it was just so like Stevie I knew it had to be true. After that, I just let them wipe everything out of me, including my name. 

Never told him that, either. Hearing that him going down in that plane was the thing that broke me? I know what that woulda done to him.

I don’t really remember much from the years after they said Stevie was dead. Bits and pieces, but I don’t want any more than that. My memory starts to pick up again after the Battle of the Triskelion. I don’t remember going to ground in Bucharest, not really, but sometime after that, things started coming back to me. Found an old publicity picture of Captain America in my stuff. It says it’s from the Smithsonian, so I guess maybe I musta gone there after the battle or something, but I don’t remember that. The picture, though, was like some kinda key to my brain. Started me trying to figure out who I’d been, who he was. I wrote stuff down in a notebook for a while, to keep it straight.

With the memories came the feelings. I think that was worse than Hydra. I remembered growing up with Steve, and everything after. I remembered falling for him, and I knew I loved him still. Only now I was… whatever I’d become. Certainly not someone who could ever claim to be a friend of Captain America. 

I reckoned without Stevie.

Turns out he searched for me from the minute he learned I was alive. Steve Rogers defied the whole world to rescue me. That’s the kind of friend he is. The kind of man he is. Didn’t care what I was, didn’t care about the arm, he was just happy I was alive and determined to find me. Did it in the nick of time, too, because he showed up only minutes before all the agencies trying to find the Winter Soldier did. 

Of course, because it’s us, that wasn’t the end of it. There was an asshole with an agenda – there’s always an asshole with an agenda – and we had to return to Siberia to stop him. That didn’t go too good, but at least there isn’t a team of Winter Soldiers ravaging the world.

When the dust settled, we ended up in Wakanda. That’s where he gave me this picture back. 

It’s a fuckin’ miracle it survived. I put it in my foot locker when Stevie got to Europe, because what did I need it for when I had the real thing, all blown up and full of muscles? Turns out, when he thought I died fallin’ off that train,  _ he  _ was the one who started carrying it around. 

He stayed with me in Wakanda for a long time while I was getting all the Hydra shit cleaned outta my brain. I really think that was the best time we ever had. It was just him and me, and our whole job was to remember our lives in Brooklyn and with the Howlies. It was therapy, to help me remember who I am. We lived together in this little hut and we just talked and laughed and slept about two feet apart and we were safe and it was like being in fucking heaven. We always hugged a lot and stuff, anyway, and in Wakanda it seemed like we couldn’t stop touching each other. It was just such a miracle to be there together. We’d been through so fucking much, and I think he missed me as much as I missed him. He kept telling me how good it was to be around someone from what he always called “our” time. 

I wanted him then, sure, but I’m so used to just living with it that it wasn’t a problem. As long as he was right there, and he was all mine, it was everything I needed. The Avengers left him pretty much alone during that time. He only went on missions when they couldn’t spare him. He made it clear that I was his priority and they respected that. I ain’t got the words to express what it felt like to hear him say that. If I hadn’t been so sick with guilt, I would probably have died of happiness right then, maybe melted into the ground in a big puddle of goo. As it was, it made me cry, and for some reason he didn’t even tease me about it. He kinda cried a little, too, I guess because I was happy again after… everything.

It was before the first time he left on a mission, when he gave me this drawing back. 

Man, we tried not to cry that day. It didn’t work. We ended up laughing about the fact that we were crying. Neither one of us knew why. It couldn’t have been that he was leaving, because he was coming right back. I think we cried just because of how hard it was to see ourselves in that drawing, all young and innocent. Because by then, neither one of us felt like we had one shred of youth or innocence left.

That was another time I wanted to tell him how I feel, that day in the Golden City. He had that long hair brushed back, that beard that I still see in my dreams, and the same swagger he always had from the time he was ten. Holy fuck but I loved him that day. I loved him for everything we were to each other, and everything he’d done to find me and bring me home. I loved him for all that he went through because he was too stubborn to give up on me even though everybody (including me) told him I was a lost cause. I loved him for the way he looked at me like I was something worth saving, when I kept telling him I needed to be put down like a rabid dog. The first time I smiled, and laughed, in seventy years it was because of him. And not because he was trying to be funny, just because the fucking sun rises and sets on him as far as I’m concerned.

But everything has to end, and our time together in Wakanda did, too. Stevie stayed with me until Princess Shuri finished the treatment to try to mend as much of the physical damage to my brain as possible. After that, it was a matter of figuring out how to live for myself after all this time. I never wanted to see another weapon again; all I wanted was peace and quiet. I had that in Wakanda, and they said I was welcome to stay. 

Steve would have stayed with me if I’d asked. He kept offering. But how could I ever justify that? Besides, it wasn’t what he wanted or needed. He needed to be fighting bullies, same as always. For me, a small, quiet life tending goats was healing. For him, it woulda been prison. 

So for a while, we were apart again, although we talked and texted all the time, and he visited every couple weeks. 

Then Thanos came, and Steve and T’Challa asked for my help.

There’s never been anything I wouldn’t do for Steve Rogers, and I owe T’Challa more than I’ll ever be able to repay. So they fit me with a new arm and I suited up for another fight. As much as I didn’t want to be there, I was surprised how good, how right it felt to be standing next to Steve on the front lines again. That was the only good thing about that day, though. The fight was hideous, but what came after… 

God help Steve. For him, me and a whole lot of other people dissolved and just blew away that day. He watched me turn to dust right in front of him. Steve was left to try to figure out how to live in a world where half the people disappeared in one snap of Thanos’s fingers. There was no intervening time for those of us snapped out of existence. But for Steve and the rest of the poor suckers who had to stay, half the world was dead for five years. 

That’s what did it, I think. 

When Thanos returned, Steve fought until he was the last man standing against him and his armies. A lot of powerful superpeople were working elsewhere to get the rest of us back. When they did, we helped Steve overcome Thanos and those armies, once and for all.

But it was too late for Steve.

After the final battle, we were together pretty much every minute. For me, no time had passed since the first battle with Thanos. But even before I learned about the Snap, I could see that something had happened to Steve. Steve after the Snap was not the Steve I had known. He’d never been grim before, but after that final battle, that’s the only word I can use to describe him. He smiled, he even laughed, but it was like all the spark had gone out of him, like nothing could ever really touch him through the exhaustion. Not even another seventy years of sleep woulda helped.

He didn’t seem to want to let me out of his sight after the battle, and I sure didn’t argue. I mean, I gave him shit about it, because it’s us. But he knew I’d do anything he wanted, like always. 

I sure as hell wanted to spend every minute with him. After all, I ain’t wanted to let him out of my sight since I was about fifteen, so I was perfectly happy to stay glued together. And he was a wreck.

I remember the first night. We were both pretty beat up, both in medical. The docs wanted him to stay overnight, and I laughed and sat back, waiting for the fireworks to start. Only they didn’t. He looked at me with something in his eyes I never saw before, and he said, “Yeah, I think I’ll stay with Buck.”

Now, I hadn’t been planning to stay, either – I’ve had way more than enough of anything medical – but I know my Stevie. He thought I should stay in medical, even though he was hurt way worse than me, because he’s a dumbass who doesn’t care much about his own injuries but flips his lid when I get hurt. He knew I wouldn’t stay unless he made me. So what he was saying was, he meant to make me stay in medical. Long as he was gonna be there, too, that was okay by me. Plus, there was that weird look on his face that I didn’t like. So I acted put out about it, but I didn’t kick up too much of a fuss. He asked the docs to put us in a double room, and that’s what they did.

After we got out of medical, I went back to his place with him. We didn’t talk about it; didn’t need to. We’d both had enough of cooling our heels in bed, even though we were still healing. So once we got to his place, we just sat around yakking. It didn’t take long before he started telling me about the Snap, and seeing me turn into a pile of dust, and what the world had been like since. And that’s when things got rough. 

Ain’t gonna talk much about that, because it’s between him and me. Never betrayed Steve’s confidence before, and I ain’t about to start now. Let’s just say that’s when I learned just how much of a wreck he truly was. I’ve held Steve Rogers when he was a half-step from death’s door a few times, mostly when he was younger and small, but a couple times when we were with the Howling Commandos and he got hurt bad enough to kill a regular guy. But that day? I was as scared for him as I’ve ever been. 

He was done. 

Not beaten, never beaten, just finished with his fight and not interested in starting another one. Just empty of anything left to give, so worn down by grief and pain that I was bawling right along with him, just seeing it. Never seen Steve like that, and never wanted to. Damn near broke my heart, seeing him so destroyed. Steve’s pain has always been my pain, anyway. 

He talked all that day and way into the night, pouring his guts out like he’d die if that shit stayed inside him a second longer. He said there wasn’t anyone else he could talk to in all those five years. Not like me. After the Snap, he always had to seem hopeful and strong for everybody else, couldn’t let anybody see how broken he was. But him and me never had to pretend. I felt real bad for him, as busted up as he was, but it was still pretty good to hear that part hadn’t changed. When it got late and he still wasn’t done unloading, I made him lay down and said I’d stay with him. He finally ended up falling asleep, me holding him just like old times. 

The next day he told me he was gonna volunteer to return all the Infinity Stones to their right times. I knew before he said it that he didn’t mean to come back. 

He was asking my permission. 

I don’t think I breathed the whole time he talked about staying in the past, finding Peggy Carter and trying to have the life he’d dreamed of during the war. He said the only thing good about the future was finding me here, and being able to get me away from Hydra. He said there was nothing but me keeping him here. But now that I’m safe, and as healed as I’m gonna get...

In all the years since I knew I was in love with him, that was the moment I came closest to telling him. I don’t know what he woulda said. I like to think he woulda took it well. Sometimes, when it got to hurting real bad, I’ve imagined him saying he’d give it a try. Thought about him learning to love me back a little. And I knew this was my last chance. I knew if I said nothing, I’d lose him forever. Thought I’d rip in two sitting there, him apologizing to me and trying to make me understand why he had to do it, all the while with no idea he’d be taking half my soul with him.

He’s never been as beautiful as he was in that moment. He was lit up from inside by the idea that he could go back to when the world made sense and he knew who he was, could lay down the shield and stop fighting, just find his girl and make a family and a life like normal people. I just sat there, soaking him in, trying to find the strength to tell him I love him and beg him to stay with me, or take me with him. Anything, just so I could be with him, hear his voice, watch him smile, see those pretty blue eyes, get sore at him for the hundred and one dumb things he does in a day.

But like I said, I love him. I’ve only ever loved him. I mean, where the hell do you go from perfect? And that meant I had to let him go. He was already too beat up to keep going in this future he hated. Already crazy with guilt about leaving me behind. How the hell was I supposed to saddle him with knowing he was breaking my heart, too? I’d take a bullet for him any day of the week. No way I was gonna do that to him.

I said yes. I gave him permission. It’s the last thing I can ever do for my Stevie and I’d do it again, even though it cost me everything. 

So Steve took the case of Infinity Stones and went off to save the world one last time. And I hugged him and tried to act like it wasn’t killing me. He looked real sorry that it was goodbye for good. Apparently, so did I, because he made a point of telling me it was gonna be okay. Why wouldn’t he? He thought it  _ would _ be okay. I lied and told him it would.

I watched Sam and Banner when the time for Steve to return came and went. Didn’t say anything, just let it happen. 

It was actually a shock to turn around and see him sitting there on that bench, hair all white but still as fit and squared away as ever. I knew he was gonna give the shield to Sam; we’d decided that together. But I didn’t know he planned to meet us there at that moment. Of course, he’d had a whole long lifetime to think about it by then. 

He looked at me, but we didn’t speak. That was our agreement, because we’ve said everything. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that he showed up at that moment, because Steve always was one to take advantage of a loophole. We said we wouldn’t talk. We never said we wouldn’t look at each other. After all the years it’s been for him, I bet he was just curious to see if he remembered me right. It’s what I woulda done. 

And that’s when I saw it. 

He shook Sam’s hand and there it was, flashing a little in the sun. Just a plain gold band, which is exactly what I would’ve expected Stevie to choose. Never was anything flashy about Steve, except the way he fought once he was big enough to win. 

That wedding ring. It’s killing me. I keep thinking about Peggy Carter, that firecracker in the red dress, and him looking at her the way I looked at him. Her getting to be the one to share his life. Her being his best friend, instead of me.

I can’t do it. This is like when they told me he was dead. It’s worse. I can’t keep feeling the way I do, when it doesn’t do him a damn bit of good and it’s eating me up from the inside out. I gotta let him go. Gotta let this love go. Gotta forget about Steve Rogers. 

It’s like Steve said, I gotta quit looking back and learn to look forward. I gotta decide to do something with this life. And in order to do that, I gotta let go of Steve, even though there won’t be much of Bucky left when I do. That’s okay. There wasn’t much left when he found me in that apartment in Bucharest, and we did okay. I was even happy, for a while. 

I’m safe now, I’m not Hydra’s mindless killing machine anymore, and I got the chance to use all the enhancements and this amazing arm for the right reasons. I got some people I think might become friends. I’ll be all right.

So I take out the drawing Steve made of us, two best friends, young and dumb and full of hope, looking at each other and laughing. I try not to get tears on it, which seems stupid considering I’m about to light it on fire, but fire seems clean and respectful. Sacred somehow. It won’t ruin the drawing, it’ll just turn it into smoke that’ll rise to heaven and maybe take my memory of Steve with it. 

I hold the picture out, taking a last look at our laughing mugs. I doubt I’ll ever remember what it felt like to be that innocent, but I sit here and remember how it felt to be that much in love. One last time. 

And then I flick my zippo, the one Steve gave me that used to belong to Dum Dum. The paper catches immediately. It’s so old, so thin, that it flares brightly in less than a second. It consumes me first, and then I get one last look at that beautiful, laughing face, looking at me like we’re the best friends in the whole world. 

And then it’s gone. 

I sit for a while, watching the weird eddies of wind in this alley catch hold of the ashes and then scatter them. Then I stand up, none too steady but already pretty much sober again despite all the rye. Wipe my eyes on my sleeve, take in a big breath and let it out. And then I turn my eyes to the outlet from the alley. I put one foot out and take the first step forward. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Karadanverss (nomadicwolf, CanarysArrow) for the outstanding inspiration of her beautiful video (Iink above underneath her gorgeous banner). I listened to the song over and over while writing, and now it will forever be connected in my heart with Stucky.
> 
> Thank you to MangoandPersimmon for Beta-ing. All of the remaining errors are mine.
> 
> I have the same feelings about Endgame as everyone who ships Stucky, but I've worked out my anger at Steve in another fic ("Others Like Me"). In this one, I wanted both Steve and Bucky to be the guys. I've always rationalized Steve's decision by believing he was simply broken by The Snap. After they undid it, he was done. He had no more to give. And I absolutely know that he would have discussed his decision with Bucky, even asked for his permission. What if Bucky's simply a product of his upbringing in the 1930's, and kept his love for Steve a secret?


End file.
